PennantChase.com Free Baseball Sim League Newshttps://www.pennantchase.com/news.aspxThe latest news and notes on the free baseball sim league site PennantChase.com.Copyright 2008 Bacci Media LLC. All rights reserved.Note on some upcoming changes, specifically to Quick DraftAs some of you know, I decided to put a pause on the redesign that I mentioned in my prior blog post so that I could focus on some key feature improvements. My goal is to clean up some of the problematic areas of the site before moving on to a full-blown redesign. I’ve been wanting to make a stronger marketing push for Pennant Chase to see if we can drive more users in, but I really think some issues need to be corrected before that happens.
As you have noticed, the "Auto Draft" was renamed "Quick Draft". Historically, I used "Auto Draft" because it was the only draft method available for Auto Leagues. But now that we have the Daily Draft, the term Auto Draft makes no sense.
Also, I am rolling out a new Quick Draft that mixes positional players and offers stronger players in general. This new draft will apply *only* to leagues that are re-drafting, and *not* leagues that have already started drafting and are waiting for more owners. In other words, nobody is going to get screwed if they already drafted their team.
Leagues that end starting on 9/21 will get this new Quick Draft. As with any new change, it’s going to be a work in progress – some will hate it, some will love it, and there will be plenty of feedback. In my few tests, I think it will have the same impact of generally balanced teams, but the overall talent will be stronger on each team, especially pitching. People generally disliked that a lot of great players were never offered, and that a lot of crappy players were offered, especially pitchers. We all know the last teams to draft tend to be given a slightly worse pool to choose from – we’ll see how this goes. If it's a total disaster, I can easily roll back to the old draft. But hopefully it works out for the better.
The next step will be to fix the free agency frenzy issue that happens in Quick Draft leagues after day 6, possibly changing to a waiver system for the first few days of the season. Also, since we are having a hard time getting Auto Leagues to fill up, I am going to look into the possibility of better CPU managers and also exposing more Auto Leagues on the Join League page at one time.
More to come!https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=61https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=61Fri, 21 Sep 2018 15:30:33 -0800Sharing phase one of major overhaul for Pennant ChaseThose of you who were around back in 2014 might remember the not-so-successful redesign that launched at the start of the year, and quickly had to be modified due to all sorts of issues. If you don’t remember it, all the better. I remember it all too well, but that’s a good thing. (If you want to re-live some history, just look back on the blog feed.)
Most people, at least the vocal ones, were not in favor of any kind of redesign. I took that as a compliment, but I also knew the site had to evolve or die. I can’t fathom how Pennant Chase would be around today if I hadn’t forged ahead back in 2014. Could you imagine a website that doesn’t work on mobile phones or doesn’t allow for the creation of a mobile app? Over 50% of new users find this site thanks to the app. We would have been dead in the water without that redesign. As painful as it was at the time, it was the right strategic decision.
We’re coming dangerously close to being in that position once again. We’re fast approaching five years since any kind of redesign, which is a millenia in technology years. Our lack of a modern design prevents me from quickly and easily leveraging many features that people consider standard nowadays, like tooltips, or confirmation screens, or suggestive search boxes, or any number of other features that could make the site experience on par with current expectations.
Furthermore, a new design would allow the site to more easily transition to future advancements in both front end and server-side code. I won’t get into the techie talk here, but a lot of the code the site runs on is in many ways obsolete.
So here’s the big news - I’ve been working on a redesign for over a year in what little time I have available. I know what some of you are going to say: “The site is fine, why waste your time on that when there are so many other valuable improvements that could be made?” First off, I’ve continued to make fixes and improvements despite the ongoing work on the redesign. Second, the redesign is going to lead to the opportunity to make more changes across the site. As I re-imagine and re-work basically every page, it lends the opportunity to make things better.
This time around, you are all going to be able to give it a spin and provide feedback before the design is “final”. In fact, it could take another year or more for this design to reach all pages of the site. During that time, the current design will still be available. I’m starting with non-league functions such as the message boards, and once that stuff is all ready, I’ll move onto actual league pages. But this is going to be a long process. The cool thing is, it’s a chance for me to work in new features, and have you all chime in on the features you want to see.
I know some people will hate the redesign, at least at first. When you’re on a website as much as we are all on Pennant Chase, you learn to love it the way it is. But I hope most everyone will come to appreciate the changes and embrace them. Much like back in 2014, we have to keep moving forward.
For example, one of the new areas you’ll see today is the boards and personal inbox. There are a ton of changes, so many that I’m not even going to list them, I’m just going to let you experience it and let me know what you think.
So here’s the link to start checking out: <a href="/home/baseball"><b>The New PC!</b></a>
In terms of non-league pages, I’ve gotten to everything but the Join Leagues and My League List areas. You can start using the new design pages as you wish, but please note this is considered “Beta” so you may find bugs or issues - if you do, please let me know!https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=60https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=60Mon, 27 Aug 2018 09:11:22 -0800Survey results from July of 2018Lots of interesting stuff to cover from yesterday’s survey. One nice thing is that I only had to keep it up for a day because over 400 people responded! There were a few duplicates or bogus submissions, and those were easily removed. By the way, if you didn’t get to take it and want to throw your opinion in, it’s still available:
<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMMhQKCI6XeFqsPbAuOPRw_CUh8DXQ_aPCsKBTcjfpk_ZB_w/viewform?usp=sf_link">Survey Here</a>
Here are some of the really interesting responses:
<img src="https://snag.gy/jSNJT5.jpg" style="width:100%" />
<img src="https://snag.gy/Gz8tO2.jpg" style="width:100%" />
<img src="https://snag.gy/ZUS5C8.jpg" style="width:100%" />
These three results are really interesting… people are clearly lukewarm on introducing CPU teams, which I can appreciate, but they really want to see more types of Auto Leagues. At the same time, they hate the idea of smaller leagues.
It shows how challenging this issue is - leagues are not filling fast, so introducing more types of Auto Leagues is only going to cause them to fill even slower. Yet people really want more leagues, yet they don’t want fewer teams.
Maybe there’s a happy medium where at most we could have 1 or 2 CPU teams to help move things along. We did this before, but the CPU teams were really bad because it was thrown together pretty quickly.
Now some more fascinating stuff:
<img src="https://snag.gy/DFjk3R.jpg" style="width:100%" />
<img src="https://snag.gy/epNazP.jpg" style="width:100%" />
<img src="https://snag.gy/qIMet2.jpg" style="width:100%" />
<img src="https://snag.gy/3VuKOG.jpg" style="width:100%" />
<img src="https://snag.gy/kdeOUy.jpg" style="width:100%" />
Here’s the thing about all the above results. It’s important for people to understand that a vocal minority of discontents tend to show on the boards, and when I make decisions, I have to consider a much larger, silent constituency. That’s why I do these “annoying” surveys (as some people called them) in the first place.
That said, the vocal minority is still very important in calling out issues. While most people thought the sim results were fine, there clearly was an issue with offense developing. Without people alerting me, it would be hard for me to know.
But you can see that most people like Rank or don’t care either way. What was also fascinating is that the top reasons people like Rank are for the “better visibility” (52%) and “fairness to new players” (55%) which is not what I was expecting. Rank was first and foremost put in place to provide better leveling of the stats that matter, but only 34% of people cared about that. The other thing people really like is the improved balance in the Auto Draft and better team rankings for Supp Draft (both at 50%). So Rank has a lot of positive impact despite some people hating it.
I think Rank has been important for a lot of reasons, but if I could do it all over again I would probably hide it so it wasn’t creating such an outroar or doing things like impacting trades. But you can see that it has quickly become an important thing to a majority of people.
Is it always right to appease the majority? No, of course not. But this is one where I think it makes sense to find out what people really want. I’m not up for 60% of the site going crazy because I react and suddenly hide Rank from everyone.
Finally, as for limited Slump Buster, it’s not exactly a run-away winner, because almost half of people don’t want it or don’t care. This one is tricky because there are two ways to look at it. Only 28% of people would be unhappy if I changed it, but it’s still only about 50/50 in terms of people who really want it. I’m leaning toward making this change because it makes sense in regards to realistic sim results.
<img src="https://snag.gy/KFTQGc.jpg" style="width:100%" />
As for the verbatims, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, which will take time to read through entirely. One of the last entries was an “ad-free” site for a small monthly fee of $2. That just goes to show how much people don’t understand the reality of running this site. The monthly fee would absolutely have to be more than $2, and thus very few people would participate, which is why monetization is such a challenging issue, and why we all have to deal with ads.
As for “themes” - there were a lot of suggestions around more managerial control. This was probably the biggest “group” of suggestions. I can appreciate all those, and I’ll simply do what I can in that arena - it’s an area of endless possibilities and lot of work, so it’s a tough area to make progress, but there are some obvious wins we could have there.
There was a lot of feedback about players not playing up to their Real Stats. This is one of the hardest things about running a site like this, people don’t understand the zero-sum reality and that nobody is going to play close to real stats in most of the types of leagues offered.
Other trends - a lot of people had issues with the free agency free-for-all in Auto Leagues. A lot of people wanted better replays with graphics - this was a surprise. (But sorry, that one is probably never going to happen unless EA buys the site.)
There was a LOT more in the verbatim's - you can imagine, almost 400 unique ideas to make the site better! Now if only I could win the PowerBall, or didn’t need to sleep...https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=59https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=59Tue, 10 Jul 2018 10:46:08 -0800Guide to running a real progression re-wind leaguePC user BuddlyHartley recently put together a guide for advancing a Real-Life "Rewind" league that he was handing off to another commissioner. It's a guide that others who want to run this type of league might find helpful, and Buddy was willing to share it with the community.
A "Rewind" league is where you are building the exact teams from baseball's past, and advancing those teams to the their next real-life season, while not wanting to lose a player's compiled stats from season to season. It's tough to run this type of league because there's a lot of clean-up to do and new players to add each season. But it's rewarding work if you're willing to put in the effort!
Here is Buddy's guide:
This is a Guide that I prepared to help the new commissioner of a Real Progression league called "Classic Rewind", but it can be applied to any Real Progression league. It is not the only way to run such a league, and other commissioners will use different approaches, but it does cover all of the basic steps in a systematic way that a brand-new commissioner to such a league might find helpful.
When a season is running, any league is easy, but it is those “End-of-season tasks” that make this league a lot more time consuming.
First off, I've usually got about 9 pages open on my computer when I am doing the year end stuff.
1. The League Home Page, just to keep everyone up to date.
2-3. Two pages of the Current Roster for the team I am working on. You’ll see why later.
4. The Holding Team Roster
5. Commissioner Tools open to Apply Player Progression
6. Commissioner Tools open to Import Historic Player or Team
7. Free Agent List open to Retired Players
8. baseball-reference open to the new season for the team that I will be progressing.
9. baseball-reference open for individual player look-ups.
<b>Tasks:</b>
I am assuming that you have already worked through all the easy stuff after the World Series that are on the Post-Season Wizard list, such as
-- Award Championship Trophy
-- Award Owner a Ring
-- Clear Compiled Stats
-- Clear Game Results – NOTE: Don’t hurry on this one. You might want to leave the World Series results up for a day or two, so that people have a chance to see the boxscores, or some will complain. Also, on that Clear Game Results page, here is how you deal with that page … Uncheck “Clear Transaction Log”, because in Classic Rewind we keep a record of our transactions from year to year. Keep the next box “Set Each Team’s Trades Back to Zero” checked -- and don’t forget to Pick a World Series MVP, if you haven’t already.
We do NOT do Step #10 on the Wizard list called “Clear Team Rosters.
Now you are at the big step …. “Age Players” …. This is where you do the “Real Progression”, and this is where I will spend my time explaining what I do, as this is where you will spend several hours every off-season.
Here is the order in which I do things, but you can adapt this any way you want, as they aren’t really written in stone. I just find that going in this order saves me time, and also helps me not miss anything.
1. Sort out the Holding Team and write down all the players who will be returning in the new season on a piece of paper, and what team they will be coming back to. Keep that list handy.
2. Starting with Free Agents, and then moving on to the first team (usually Atlanta, since I do them in alphabetical order), hit the "Apply Player Progression" button, making sure that it is set for "Real Life (Rarely Used)".
3. After you hit the button, a bunch of players will be then listed at the top of the page as "Retired". <em>Guy’s Note</em> – I am removing this part of Buddy’s guide because I recently made a change to how retirement is handled in real-life progression. When you progress players, it un-retires every player and then tries to advance them if they are active in the season you are advancing to. If they are not, you will see “re-retired” on the list after you progress. Players that come out of retirement will now be free agents. You will have to assign these free agents to the right team if you are doing a “rewind” league like Buddy is describing.
4. Once you’ve dealt with any Retired players who aren’t really retired, you can then go to the two current rosters (pages 2&3) and refresh just page 3. You can then, if you wish, compare the previous year’s team (page 2) with the new season’s team after progression (page 3), and see what players had big improvements or big drops. As Commish, I sort of like to stay on top of this stuff for every team, just so I have the big picture. Once I’m done with last year’s squad, I delete page 2 (for now, as I’ll replace it when I start on the next team).
5. Now you need to import the new rookie players to the team. Go the baseball-reference page for that team for the new season, and basically work your way down the list through EVERY player. Remember to even look guys up who had 2 AB or 5 IP, because some players played for 2 (or more) teams in their rookie seasons.
6. After all Rookie Imports are done, then you need to move over any players from the Holding Team that are ready to return to that team. (With the new changes you may no longer need a holding team. Just move free agents who are not retired to their real teams.) This is usually a very small number of players, if any.
7. So that’s it … you’ve now done one team. Congratulations!!! Only 23 more to go!! LOL It is quite the process, and it can take hours to work through every team, but I have actually found it quite interesting and fun to do. Just don’t hurry. Take your time and enjoy the process. The league is not going anywhere. If someone quits because you took a day or two longer then they thought was necessary, wave them goodbye, as they are jerks anyway. Anyone who has done the commissioner duties in a real progression league, and knows how much work it is to do, is just happy it gets done and that someone is willing to do it, whether it takes a week or two or even three to finish. It’s a BIG job!
8. We can skip the next item on the Wizard, since we don’t “Retire Players” in this league. That is done automatically when we do the real progressions.
9. “Create New Schedule”. As I mentioned before, you don’t really want to do this … EVER. It is one of the worst tasks that a Commissioner can do, and totally thankless. So I leave everything in the first 3 Options alone, and jump down to Option #4 “Swap Teams on Schedule”. This is just done for variety, but I think is worth doing. But … when you swap teams, you can ONLY swap teams within the same Division, or it will throw the entire schedule out of whack. Remember, this is an original schedule, so games are already weighted to teams in your own division first, then out of your division. Also, I do this randomly, and don’t write down my choices from year to year, so that there is no pattern to it. You can do it differently if you wish, but I didn’t want it to become predictable.
So once you’ve swapped all the teams, go to the Schedule page, then go to “Switch to all Upcoming Games”, and then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the schedule. All teams should have 81 Home Games, and 81 Away Games. Hopefully no problems there, as the schedule has been fine for the past 3 seasons. Just always remember that it is a 176 Day Schedule, not a 162 Day schedule, and you’ll be fine.
Thanks again Buddy for sharing!https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=58https://www.pennantchase.com/NewsStory.aspx?bid=58Tue, 29 May 2018 09:07:28 -0800